Many of his productions in the years after “Seascape” were savaged by the press as inconsequential trickery, a shadow of his former works.
His other Pulitzers were for “A Delicate Balance” (1967) and “Seascape” (1975). He enlivened the theatre landscape.”Īlbee’s unconventional style won him great acclaim but also led to a nearly 20-year drought of critical and commercial recognition before his 1994 play, “Three Tall Women,” garnered his third Pulitzer Prize. (hash)Irreplaceable.” Playwright Lynn Nottage wrote: “I will miss his wit, irreverence & wisdom. Mia Farrow, who was in a staged reading of “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” called Albee “one of the great” playwrights “of our time.” Michael McKean wrote: “There was only one Edward Albee. Praise for the playwright came from far and wide on Twitter after his death. He did it with humor and a sense of linguistic delight, using withering barbs and word play to hint at deeper meaning. “I have the same experiences that everybody else does, but… I feel the need to translate a lot of what happens to me, a lot of what I think, into a play.”Īlbee challenged audiences to question their assumptions about society and about theater itself.
“It’s just a quirk of the brain that makes one a playwright,” Albee said in 2008. “If you have no wounds, how can you know you’re alive?” a character asks in Albee’s 1996 “The Play About the Baby.” In more than 30 plays, Albee skewered such mainstays of American culture as marriage, child-rearing, religion and upper-class comforts. The play’s sharp-tongued humor and dark themes were the hallmarks of Albee’s style. The Tony-winning play, still widely considered Albee’s finest, was made into an award-winning 1966 film starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. Several years ago, before undergoing extensive surgery, Albee penned a note to be issued at the time of his death: “To all of you who have made my being alive so wonderful, so exciting and so full, my thanks and all my love.”Īlbee was proclaimed the playwright of his generation after his blistering “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” opened on Broadway in 1962. With the deaths of Arthur Miller and August Wilson in 2005, he was arguably America’s greatest living playwright. No cause of death was immediately given, although he had suffered from diabetes. He died at his home in Montauk, east of New York, assistant Jackob Holder said. NEW YORK (AP) - Three-time Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Edward Albee, who challenged theatrical convention in masterworks such as “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” and “A Delicate Balance,” died Friday, his personal assistant said.